Star Witness

by Richard Kluger

Throughout post-Watergate America, a land of widespread disenchantment, women by the thousands are flocking into the legal profession - not a few of them idealists. But what is it like, if you are a young, single female today, to crash this bastion of male power?

Richard Kluger, who has written compellingly on the law as both novelist and historian, creates in Star Witness a character study of one embattled woman lawyer at the forefront of her sex's struggle for professional recognition and dignity. At twenty-eight, Tabor Hill is brainy, becoming, resourceful, and intensely ambitious. When she joins the most respectable law firm in her city, it is not long before the shock waves are being felt all over town.

Is Tabor a tireless, savvy combatant or a willful, manipulative schemer? The answer depends on whether you consult her admirers or her detractors, whom she seems to attract in almost equal numbers. Caught between championing the interests of her firm's clients and those that her own humanitarian impulses embrace, the nervy Ms. Hill is forever flirting with indiscretion and disaster.

Star Witness is an adventure of the heart and mind. Here is the dilemma of the modern professional woman who discovers the battering her values must endure if she is to achieve and then sustain success on her own terms.

471 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1979

About the author

Richard Kluger is an American social historian and novelist who, after working as a New York journalist and publishing executive, turned in mid-career to writing books that have won wide critical acclaim. His two best known works are Simple Justice, considered the definitive account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision outlawing racially segregated public schools, and Ashes to Ashes, a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on smokers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Born in Paterson, N.J., Kluger grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Princeton University, where he chaired The Daily Princetonian. As a young journalist, he wrote and edited for The Wall Street Journal, the pre-Murdoch New York Post and Forbes magazine, and became the last literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune and its literary supplement, Book Week. When the Tribune folded, Kluger entered the book industry, rising to executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books.

Moved by the cultural upheavals sweeping across the U.S., Kluger left publishing and devoted five years to writing Simple Justice, which The Nation hailed as “a monumental accomplishment” and the Harvard Law Review termed “a major contribution to our understanding of the Supreme Court.” It was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was Kluger’s second nonfiction work, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. It was followed by Ashes to Ashes and three other well received works of history,
Seizing Destiny , about the relentless expansion of America’s territorial boundaries; The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek, about a tragic clash between white settlers and tribal natives in territorial Washington, and Indelible Ink, about publisher John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in America.

Of his seven novels, the most widely read were Members of the Tribe, warmly praised by the Chicago Tribune said, and The Sheriff of Nottingham, which Time called “richly imagined and beautifully written.” He also co-authored two novels with his wife Phyllis, a fiber artist and herself the author of two books on needlework design. The Klugers live in Berkeley.